I recently was tasked with making an RDS amazon server with
a set IOPS on its hard drive. AWS offers
guaranteed IOPS speed for a higher price.
It’s a very useful feature to guarantee speed on your Database.

I wanted to test our current "Live" database to
see what IOPS it is currently using. I
found a few calculator sites out there to figure out our theoretical IOPS on
the database server such as http://wintelguy.com/raidperf.pl
[2]. We got an estimate of ~400
IOPS. This number made me feel good,
since the smallest IOPS you can buy on AWS is 1,000 and increment by 1,000.

This estimated rate is not the actual live rate,
just an estimate of capacity. I wanted
to see what the actual rate we were using is.

iostat command

The iostat command is no longer installed by default on
Ubuntu (my linux flavor of choice).